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In the complexity of the governance issues they face, today’s biggest platform businesses resemble nation-states. With more than 1.5 billion users, Facebook oversees a “population” larger than China’s. Google handles 64 percent of the online searches in the U.S. and 90 percent of those in Europe, w…

[...] How do you convert a product to a platform in the business-to-business (B2B) arena? Many corporations own massive fixed assets like power generation plants, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, or tracts of farmland. How do you build platforms around those?

The answer: you de-link ow…

[...] Unlike traditional offline pipelines, online pipelines benefited from low marginal costs of distribution—sometimes as low as zero. This allowed them to target and serve large markets with much smaller investment.

Traditional media companies were the first to feel the pinch. Newspapers were…